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This website is a "reputation builder" for kids of all ages. When a child is in K-12, the parent has their account attached but then, the child can take it public after that point. This is a "reputation builder" for kids. Many students in Florida are already using this with their parents. This may be an option for efolio building where parents are involved. Worth a look for those working with digital citizenship and to share with parents.

If you want to record your Google hangouts and post to your YouTube channel, you need to get started with "Hangouts on Air." HEre's the page to get you started. Note that Google plus isn't available for Apps for education so you'll need to use your personal or another gmail account with a Google plus profile if you want to record and share your class hangouts.

More and more people are throwing away their USB memory sticks (but probably just losing them down the back of the sofa) in favour of cloud storage. This is a wonderful storage site, download and multi-platform app which is very similar to Dropbox. A synced folder sits on you devices and can be updated and accessed from any device. You can generating a url to share folders or files with other people. It works just fine on a computer with Dropbox already installed and the free account gives you 15GB of storage. That's enough storage where 'tidy' filing schools might begin to migrate their school network storage to the cloud for free - and that's exciting. Additional storage is available for a price.

Demo site for showing Google Docs to people who don't have an account. It refreshes every hour. Very nice. Shared on Twitter recently

Here's a roundup of the APIs to mine Twitter data: Trstrank: The PageRank-esque algorithm we covered previouslyWordbag: A list of "most common words" for a user with a twist. Universally-common words are essentially filtered out because InfoChimps compares a user's word choice to all of Twitter.Influence: Gets the number of replies in and out for the user, along wiht the number of tweets and the age of the account. Analysis of influence is up to you.Conversation: Provides a summary of public interactions between two users. Results are a list of tweets in which the first user replied to the second.

Are you searching for a way to share documents, presentations, slideshows, or a series of photos or images with your students? Then Voice Thread is the free Web 2.0 tool for you and your students (teachers can register for a free education account).

Free BigHugeLabs Education account - preregister students so there is no email required, advertising free!, Download and view content created by students.

Student test scores are not reliable indicators of teacher effectiveness, according to a new Economic Policy Institute report, Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers. The paper was co-authored by a group of distinguished education scholars and policy makers, including four former presidents of the American Educational Research Association, a former assistant U.S. Secretary of Education, EPI Research Associate Richard Rothstein, and others. The authors find that the accuracy of these analyses of student test scores is highly problematic. They argue that the practice of holding teachers accountable for their student's test score results should be reconsidered.

I'm sorry, but if this is news to anyone, you've been asleep at your desk. I'm sick of people being all professional about this issue, it is well past time to rebel against it. It's bad for the teachers, it's bad for the students, it's bad for society, and it's bad for the economics of education too! Get active, join a group against NCLB & high-stakes testing, and END IT. I would post the group(s) I work with, but I don't want to be dismissed as promoting them - find one(s) that are right for you and get behind them.

Participants in today's Parent Coffee Talk will create a Google Account and sign into Google Reader. A great school blog. Also see: Grade 2 video blog tutorial for parents http://www.mjgds.org/21stcenturylearning/?p=445

a guide to using the free online storage at dropbox.com.  if you don't have an account yet, here is an invite:  http://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTE3MDMxNTE5?src=7 you can increase the basic storage by inviting other users. i have all my school files stored there, including all video! it's a great service :O)

This is useful... Thanks for sharing!

Using Skype in the Classroom Desktop Voice and Videoconferencing Software in Education Discover how to communicate and collaborate with friends, colleagues, resource experts, and other classrooms using Skype. Skype is a program that allows users to communication with voice, videoconferencing, or chat for free between computers. Create a Skype account, add contacts, and conduct free audio and video conferences between computers. Explore creative ways to use this tool to enhance teaching and learning.

Fascinating way to create virtual servers.

This software lets you take one host PC server and this lets you virtualize servers. In Walton County - have 100 servers and 60 are virtual. All independent and have their own IP address and appear completely independent -- they have 6 blade servers. This does cost money. This would let me move the Accelerated Reader and Accounting system to separate "virtual servers" and if one needed to reboot, I could reboot a "virtual server" and not the physical server. This is from an expert IT - Jack Higgins, Network Analyst - Walton County schools in Atlanta, GA -- met by accident in the Atlanta airport. A lot of these bookmarks are from him!

See Sharon Elin's comment

GOt this letter from Pownce today: "We are sad to announce that Pownce is shutting down on December 15, 2008. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new pro accounts. To help with your transition, we have built an export tool so you can save your content. You can find the export tool at Settings > Export. Please export your content by December 15, 2008, as the site will not be accessible after this date." I predict that 2009 will be the year many Web 2.0 apps were "left behind." Export that data -- bye bye lots of stuff.

Building a PLN has just gotten easier.

Organizations are starting to get things together to create widgets to help academicians, authors, and others to build a very powerful PLN (personal learning network) with their igoogle or netvibes. They seem to prefer Netvibes for a couple of reasons - and I maintain an account on both, although I startup on igoogle. There are Bespoke repository service widgets and repository information widgets. They even have a page to see what these widgets do (also in this post.) Every modern student (and professor and teacher) should understand how to build a PLN.

This is the best example of how professional development works.

I love this post. This is how Web 2.0 spreads. I want to quote from the author: "Then I showed him wikispaces and the lightbulb went off. In a voice full of what I can only describe as awe, he said, and I'm paraphrasing him, "This could change the way we teach." (Cue the heavenly music). While I was showing him each tool, we discussed how he could integrate it into his teaching practices. I know I probably overwhelmed him, but he's excited and energetic. He left with a brand new Google account and having created his classroom wiki. That and he's vowed to share what he's learned with his fellow teachers. Here's hoping this goes viral - if at least a little." I love it. It is the one on one time and the lights go off. This is how it works best. we need to have more one on one time planned in order to promote change. People want the attention -- no one likes to feel like an underappreciated cog in an overworked machine.

It doesn't matter how many accounts or profiles that you have. Atomkeep is the only place that you need to keep them in sync. We don't force other sites to partner with us, although, we would appreciate any partnership opportunities. All we do is making your life easier. Atomkeep is completely user oriented product.

Publishing from Google Docs to blogger. So, this is what you could do. The teacher has enabled the link to the blog in the teacher's account settings. Students and many others create a document and then share it with the teacher. After the document is as it needs to be, the teacher can then post to blogger from google docs automatically. This really gives you the best of wikis, blogs, and peer review as well as the ability to look at the revisions and who has contributed. This is something that I'm going to look at doing.

Information on posting to blog from Google Docs

The report concludes that effective uses of technology to enhance student achievement are based on four building blocks which are alignment, assessment, accountability, and access and analysis. Its definition of student achievement includes 21st Century skills. The report describes 21st Century skills as "a new set of skills necessary to prepare students for life and work in the digital age. These skills include digital literacy, inventive thinking, effective communication and high productivity abilities" (p. 32).